Problem ticket generation usually is the first step in today's information technology (IT) process services management. In enterprise server management environment, support teams usually record problem resolution steps in problem records, also referred to as tickets, as part of their standard problem management process. The problem ticket generation step is responsible for describing problem symptoms reported by customers, and the problem ticket is the link between customer and services infrastructure. Once a problem ticket is generated, it will be queued in the ticketing system and routed to an appropriate center or person for problem determination. In the case when the ticket is opened either manually or automatically via monitoring systems, there are several fields to document information from the party reporting the problem.
Typically, these problem records or tickets are stored in relational databases with both structured (e.g. current status, problem type, support person/group handling the problem, type of system and component related to the problem) as well as unstructured (e.g. free-format text description of problem and solution as entered by the support personnel) attributes. The data also includes some form of quality assessment, time management, and business processing aspects.
The way problem records are entered into the ticketing system is also not standardized, and as a result, a number of overlapping, unstructured and even confusing attributes are present within the problem ticket records. For example, the problem records may contain a number of words, phrases, descriptions or even acronyms recorded or entered in an unstructured fashion. Such unstructured record tends to make searching on the records difficult. When it comes to problem resolution, system administrators often resort to ad-hoc keyword searches in problem record databases or even on Internet web sites manually.
FIG. 1 illustrates a known keyword methodology used in such ad-hoc keyword searches. All existing ticket information 101 is searched using one or more keywords shown at 102 to generate the result set shown at 103. These problem records are mostly used for tracking, auditing and reporting the problem at hand.
Known ticket classification methodologies do not combine the structure and unstructured attributes in a meaningful way. Furthermore, even when those methodologies use the structured attributes, they are put together with the unstructured attributes towards preparing bag of words without distinguishing of each of these structural attributes within any of the problem tickets. As a result any characteristics of any of the tickets represented by means of structural attributes get diffused within the context of unstructured field values.